IMPORTANT PAINTINGS AND IN 3D: SCULPTURE

12

3 Abbey Street, Newton PO Box 68 345, Newton Auckland 1145, New Zealand Telephone +64 9 354 4646 Freephone 0800 80 60 01 Facsimile +64 9 354 4645 info@artandobject.co.nz www.artandobject.co.nz

I M P O R TA N T PA I N T I N G S IN 3D: SCULPTURE Thursday 22 November 2007

42 Don Driver

Painted Relief No. 8 (detail – cover)

6.30pm

I M P O R TA N T PA I N T I N G S IN 3D: SCULPTURE

W

elcome to ART+OBJECT’s final major art catalogue for 2007. The foundation year for any business is a busy time, this is our seventh art auction for the year and each has had a specialist direction and theme, from Australasia’s first dedicated contemporary art auction to photography and masterpieces of New Zealand art. Our clients as sellers and purchasers have appreciated this clarity of direction and the result has been pre-auction exhibitions and catalogues where connections between works, genres and periods can be coherently made.

Our final major catalogue is also an opportunity to voice our thanks to all our clients for their support in our launch year. When the dust settles on 2007 it is our hope that the wider art market will view the launch of ART+OBJECT as a stimulating new force for the good and an organization whose philosophy adds much more value than simply managing the passing parade of artwork for sale.

We are grateful that so many sellers have entrusted us with their precious artworks and that buyers also choose to build their collections at A+O auctions.

Thanks also to the writers who have contributed to our catalogues over the course of the year. The feedback we have had to these catalogue essays has been overwhelmingly positive.

This catalogue features another New Zealand auction first, the dedicated sculpture section titled IN 3D: NZ and International sculpture and design art.

New Zealand art collectors are displaying a growing apetite for sculpture, perhaps driven by recent events such as Sculpture in the Gulf and the opening of curated outdoor sculpture environments such as the Brick Bay Sculpture Trail north of Auckland and the O’Connell’s Bay Sculpture Park on Waiheke island This first selection is a mix of smaller domestic scaled works which can be easily accommodated in a home environment through to larger works which will define a large house or corporate space.

IN 3D is another example of A+O responding not just to demand in the marketplace but also acknowledging the strength and quality of art practice in New Zealand.

Ronnie van Hout December 1948: Explaining painting to Theo Schoon, 1999 Sold for $9000 Lot number 1 in A+O’s launch Contemporary Art auction, May 3 2007.

4UBUF PG UIF BSU *OTQJSBUJPO JOOPWBUJPO BOE EFEJDBUJPO MFBE UP UIF DSFBUJPO PG UIF XPSME£T NPTU CFBVUJGVM DBST &YQFSJFODF UIF VMUJNBUF FYQSFTTJPO PG GPSN BOE GVODUJPO GPS ZPVSTFMG BU (JMUSBQ 1SFTUJHF

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2 0 T H C entur y D esign INCLUDING THE

M ichael B arrymore & S haun Davis collection Tu e s d a y 1 1 D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 7

6pm

including Ralph Lauren leather couches, Jan Ekselius armchair, Murano glass, Pablo Picasso lithograph, Bruno Matheson Pernilla chair, Finn Juhl Diplomat desk, Oman Juhnier credenza, Hans Wegner Plank chair, Ettore Sottsass ceramic totems (above) + + +. Catalogue - late November

ENQUIRIES:

James Parkinson james@artandobject.co.nz tel +64 9 354 4646 Ross Millar ross@artandobject.co.nz tel +64 9 354 4646

mob 021 222 8184 mob 021 222 8185

ARMANDO TESTA

Maggie Cheung.

Roma, july 2007.

www.poltronafrau.it

Kennedee sofa, Jean-Marie Massaud. Poltrona Frau Collection.

80 Parnell Road, Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand T +64 9 368 7777 F +64 9 368 7771 info@georgigregghome.com

T H e B arr y W il k es collection of film & t v related to y s We d n e s d a y 1 2 D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 7

6.30pm

Assembled over forty years the Wilkes collection includes mint and boxed toys from almost every major Pop culture related toy range from the 1960s and 1970s. This includes the Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90, Star Wars, Space 1999, Magic Roundabout, James Bond, The Avengers, Supercar, UFO, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and many more.

The offering represents the finest related Corgi and Dinky toys New Zealand. Also included is a large range of boxed

selection of TV ever offered in in the auction Matchbox toys.

ENQUIRIES: James

Parkinson, james@artandobject.co.nz +64 9 354 4646 mob 021 222 8184 and Hamish Coney, hamish@artandobject.co.nz +64 9 354 4646 mob 021 509 550

ANT SUMICH MEMORIAL ART AUCTION Steven Ball.

Ben Bell.

Andrea Bowers.

Stella Brennan.

Kirsty Cameron.

Joyce Campbell.

Sarah Cooper.

Lisa Crowley.

Phil Dadson.

Judy Darragh.

Sam Durant.

Bruce Everard.

Max Gimblett.

Brent Grayburn.

David Hatcher.

Derek Henderson.

Gavin Hipkins.

Lonnie Hutchinson.

Fiona Jack.

Simon Kaan.

Denise Kum. Paulus McKinnon.

Peter Madden.

Daniel Malone.

Dane Mitchell.

Sarah Munro.

Ani Oneill.

Anton Parsons.

Nova Paul.

Mike Petre.

James Pinker.

Lisa Reihana.

Layla Rudneva-McKay. Rachel Shearer.

Ann Shelton.

Carole Shepheard.

Jim Speers.

Daniel Sumich.

Julainne Sumich.

Marek Sumich.

David Thomas.

Greer Twiss.

Francis Upritchard.

Megan Vertelle.

Seung Yul Oh. and more...

Art + Object Exhibition preview: Monday Feb 4, 6-8pm Viewing: Tuesday 9-5pm, Closed Wednesday (Waitangi Day), Thursday 9-1pm

Live auction begins at 6:30pm, Thursday Feb 7 antsumichartauction.org.nz info@antsumichartauction.org.nz

Contemporar y Ar t + Objects INCLUDING THE

ART & TEXT GROUP COLLECTION et al.

Specific Sameness #3

acrylic, oil stick, masking tape and screenprint on archival paper

$4500 - $6500

Tu e s d a y 1 8 M a r c h 2 0 0 8 ENQUIRIES:

David Murray Hunter

cast glass signed, dated ‘02

$3500 - $4500

Ben Plumbly ben@artandobject.co.nz Ross Millar ross@artandobject.co.nz

6.30pm

tel +64 9 354 4646 tel +64 9 354 4646

mob 021 222 8183 mob 021 222 8185

Bill Armstrong (American, 1952) Figure #70, $6000 - $9000

Important 19th and 20th Century Photographs Early - Mid 2008

Selected entries now invited Enquiries: Ben Plumbly +64 9 354 4646 mob 021 222 8183

ben@artandobject.co.nz

IN 3D

$4000 - $6000

Laurence Aberhart Taranaki from Oeo Road Under Moonlight,

Artist Unknown Maori Studio Group $1000 - 2000

Michael Parekowhai Jimmy Rae, Larry Vickers, Lou Lombardi

from the Beverly Hills Gun Club. $9000 - $14 000

Ronnie van Hout Concorde $3000 - $5000

Max Dupain Rush Hour Kings Cross, $7000 - $10 000

Peter Peryer Christine Mathieson $7000 - $10 000

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'SPN UIF .VTFVN UIBU CSPVHIU ZPV 'SBOL $BSQBZ

14 December 2007 – 11 May 2008

)"8, & 4 #": .64&6. "35 ("--&3: /"1*&3 XXX ICNBH DP O[

THE 21st CENTURY AUCTION HOUSE 3 Abbey Street, Newton PO Box 68 345, Newton Auckland 1145, New Zealand Telephone +64 9 354 4646 Freephone 0800 80 60 01 Facsimile +64 9 354 4645 info@artandobject.co.nz www.artandobject.co.nz

I M P O R TA N T PA I N T I N G S IN 3D: SCULPTURE Thursday 22 November 2007 6.30pm VIEWING Exhibition opening Thursday 15th November Friday 16 November Saturday 17 November Sunday 18 November Monday 19 November Tuesday 20 November Wednesday 21 November

9 10 10 9 9 9

6pm – 8pm

am – 5 pm am – 5 pm am – 5 pm am – 5 pm am – 5 pm am – 5 pm

Ben Plumbly

ben@artandobject +64 9 354 4646 021 222 8185

ART

ENQUIRIES

14 15

1 Paul Dibble

Pacific Woman

bronze, 2/3 signed and dated ’96 490 x 175 x 175mm

$7000 - $10 000

2 Paul Dibble

The Southwester

bronze signed and dated 2006 670 x 530 x 135mm

$10 000 - $15 000

3 Ann Robinson

Small Pod Vase

cast glass 185 x 240 x 80mm

$5000 - $7000

4 Donald Judd

Chair, Table

white pine impressed Judd mark to underside along with date (2001) table: 380 x 450 x 380mm chair: 760 x 380 x 380mm

IN 3D

$10 000 - $15 000

16 17

5 Peter Roche

Wreath

steel, wheels (1990) signed verso 2000mm diameter

$7000 - $12 000

6 Virginia King

Phantom Canoe: From the Passage Series

macrocarpa, acrylic stains, beeswax and dammar resin (1995) 3200 x 550 x 400mm Illustrated: Liz Caughey (ed), Virginia King: Sculptor (David Bateman, 2005), pp. 3, 15, 16.

$8000 - $14 000

8 Michael Tuffery

9 Michael Tuffery

Moko Welding Mask No. 1

Moko Welding Mask No. 2

Moko Welding Mask No. 3

$1800 - $2800

$1800 - $2800

$1800 - $2800

found gas welding mask, etching and acrylic signed and dated ’05 330 x 190 x 190mm

found gas welding mask, etching and acrylic signed and dated ’05 330 x 190 x 190mm

found gas welding mask, etching and acrylic and dated ’05 330 x 190 x 190mm

IN 3D

7 Michael Tuffery

18 19

Ann Robinson 10 Ice Bowl on Stand

cast glass (unique), two pieces signed and dated ’92 630 x 380 x 380mm

Provenance:

Private Collection, Auckland

$35 000 - $50 000

B

owls have been significant within Ann Robinson’s oeuvre, and while her pieces are usually serial in nature, this one is unique. Drawn to vessels, she responds to their implied abundance and containment while tackling the complex technical challenges involved in working glass on such scale. Initially, after returning to Elam in the early 1980’s, she collaborated with Gaffer Glass to perfect a suitable recipe for casting, as opposed to blowing or slumping glass, and applied her studies in bronze sculpture towards this new medium. She has generously shared her pioneering developments so that a small, but significant, culture of cast glass artists has arisen around her and for which New Zealand enjoys an international reputation.

Impressive in scale, the Ice Bowl draws the eye while light falls on it and through it, fills it and transforms it. The colour and gradation of hue is the initial seduction but then the repetitive geometry of the surface notches crisscrossed with spontaneous fissures and crackles embedded within the depths of the glass evokes the frozen mass for which it is named. There are easy connections with glacier movement, and histories of erosion suggested here - associations with massive bodies of ice rather than thin skins over moving water.

Mounting the bowl upon a pedestal raises it into a ceremonial role that perhaps acknowledges this Pacific region with its culture of large ritual vessels, or possibly the gravitas of liturgical observances. Regional links are underscored by the colours of the glass used, from turquoise to rich cobalt and into aquamarine – that recurrent dream image of water around an atoll. While a vessel is often functional in a utilitarian sense, the real role of this bowl is facilitating all those associations to arise.

Most of Robinson’s work links with nature and this personal poetry incorporating her trailblazing in cast glass has received many accolades. She has been conferred an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit and assigned the DINZ John Britten Award for contribution to design. Long acknowledged as New Zealand’s premier glass artist there have been retrospective exhibitions at the Dowse Art Museum and Auckland City Art Gallery. Her work can be found in many public and major private collections within New Zealand and internationally.

MOYRA ELLIOTT

20 21

IN 3D ART

Billy Apple 11 Rainbow with Waterfall

plexiglass and acrylic, 1965 390 x 570 x 395mm

Exhibited:

‘Fifth Exhibition: Collectors Club of Minnesota’, Walker Art Centre, Minnesota, United States of America, June 5th – July 10th, 1966.

Provenance: Purchased by the parent’s of the current owner from Bianchini Gallery, New York on May 10, 1966.

Private collection, Minnesota, United States of America.

Private collection, South Island.

$45 000 - $65 000

I

t is a rare occurrence to be able to offer an American work by Billy Apple at auction.

Artworks from this period of his international art career have seldom been seen in New Zealand and Rainbow with Waterfall benefits from a well documented exhibition provenance.

It was one of several works by Billy Apple that had been curated into a large survey exhibition in 1966 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The exhibiting artists read like a who’s who of 60s contemporary art, alongside Billy Apple were Jean Arp, Balthus, Peter Blake, Alexander Calder, Lucio Fontana, Howard Hodgkin, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, George Rickey, Bridget Riley, Larry Rivers and Tom Wesselman.

Rainbow with Waterfall dates from Billy Apple’s second solo exhibition in New York at the Bianchini Gallery, November 23 – December 14, 1965, which featured rainbows variously presented in neon, transluscent acrylic and serigraphs on paper. Leo Castelli, the famous twentieth century art dealer who represented Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, introduced Billy Apple to Paul Bianchini when he moved from London to New York in 1964. Billy Apple was later to show at the Leo Castelli Gallery.

This particular sculpture was exhibited in the ground breaking pop art show titled Neon Rainbows, which is considered the first use of neon as an art material in pop art. Images of the works appeared in Time and Life magazines and Robert Pincus-Witten wrote that, ‘Billy Apple’s rainbows are among the most beautiful that hover over the present scene’ (Artforum, February 1966).

Works from this exhibition went on to be curated into exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery, Paris and the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and most recently at the Darren Knight Gallery in Sydney.

Rainbow with Waterfall exudes the optimism of pop art, its love of colour and a revelling in the intersection of new materials, mass market packaging and design. It comes from a time when art was at the forefront of social change and artists were in the headlines like never before.

Billy Apple is one of New Zealand’s senior artists with an international career that spans five decades. He has been at the forefront of two international art movements, first in London (pop art) then in New York (pop and conceptual art), and now resides in Auckland.

His work is held across the USA in public collections such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, California; Boise Art Museum, Idaho; and the Corning Museum of Glass, New York. He is represented in all New Zealand’s major institutions and art collections.

HAMISH CONEY in collaboration with MARY MORRISON

IN 3D

22 23

Neil Dawson 12 Cone, Cylinder and Sphere painted acrylic on steel installation size: 1240 x 3000mm approximately

Provenance:

Private Collection, Wellington

$25 000 - $35 000

Neil Daw The group featured in this catalogue Cone, Cylinder and Sphere is the private patron’s equivalent of these spectacular public works. Two of the pieces develop the forms of such larger works. There is an inverted chalice and a sphere accompanying the cylindrical form..

son

has an international reputation for his large scale works in the public arena. His symbolic Chalice in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square entered cyberspace when it became the site of a spontaneous memorial in the wake of 9/11. Feathers and Skies above the entrance to Stadium Australia for the 2000 Olympic Games is a memorable image. So too is Dawson’s Globe suspended outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris for the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre. The New Zealand equivalent is his Ferns over Wellington’s Civic Square. Aucklanders might know Dawson’s Throwback in Albert Park and they will undoubtedly have seen his Featherlight and Spectra hanging like giant chandeliers in the Aotea Centre.

ROBIN WOODWARD

IN 3D

Technically superb, each of the forms in Cone, Cylinder and Sphere demonstrates the sculptural characteristics that have made Dawson one of New Zealand’s most ‘collectable’ artists. These gravity-defying works exemplify the use of line, light, space and colour as materials in sculpture. In this they can be read in the tradition of Alexander Calder who liberated sculpture from its traditional gravity-bound, massorientated form. They also follow in the footsteps of works such as Claes Oldenburg’s Bottle of Notes which developed the concept of drawing in space and the use of silhouette in large scale works. Such features have characterized Dawson’s works since his attention-grabbing Echo (1990) that ‘floats’ above the quadrangle at the Christchurch Arts Centre. Keenly sought after for the domestic or corporate environment, Dawson’s work is not commonly on the market. Displayed singly or as a group Cone, Cylinder and Sphere is quintessential Dawson.

24 25

13 Philip Clairmont Chair mixed media and found oak dining chair dated 1976 1120 x 590 x 480mm

$6000 - $10 000

14 Llew Summers

Reclining Nude

heart rimu 410 x 180 x 240mm

$4000 - $6000

15 Terry Stringer

Egyptian Souvenir

bronze, oil and marble with lamp fitting signed and dated ’81 230 x 220 x 200mm

$5000 - $8000

16 Veronika Maser

Attunement

wire and modelling compound 810 x 280 x 300mm

$2500 - $3500

17 Terry Stringer

Female Figure

cast bronze, 3/3 signed and dated ‘91 448 x 90 x 100mm

$3000 - $5000

18 Michael Parekowhai

Atarangi #13

powder coated aluminium, three sections (2002) title printed on original Gow Langford Gallery, Sydney label affixed verso 200 x 400 x 100mm

IN 3D

$6000 - $9000

26 27

19 Ann Robinson

Thick Walled Sprial Vase

unique cast glass vase signed and dated ’95 and inscribed 1/1 425 x 165 x 165mm

$15 000 - $20 000

20 Emma Camden

From the Gate House Series cast glass 600 x 200 x 142mm

$6000 - $8000

21 Michael Parekowhai

Quadruplo (Torro, Torro, Torro)

enamel on MDF, 1990 each block: 340 x 315 x 315mm installation size: variable

IN 3D

$8 000 - $14 000

28 29

22 Charlotte Fisher

Crescent

Australian hardwood, copper, nails and rivets 2010 mm x 900 mm x 360 mm

Provenance:

Private Collection, Wellington

$6000 - $9000

23 Charlotte Fisher

Boat

Australian hardwood and flotsam, 1989 1400 x 1070 x 315mm

$6000 - $9000

24 Jacqueline Fraser

Untitled

electrical wire, 1987

Provenance:

Purchased by the current owner from Sue Crockford Gallery, circa 1988 1060 x 400mm

$3000 - $5000

25 Bronwynne Cornish

Anubis

Pottery 750 x 330 x 280mm

$2000 - $4000

26 Cade Englefield

I.H.S

cast bronze signed 355 x 190 x 60mm

IN 3D

$1000 - $2000

30 31

27 Peter Robinson

Untitled

mixed media on canvasboard variously inscribed 235 x 177mm

$2500 - $4000

28 Gavin Hurley

Tom

oil on linen signed with the artist’s initials G. J. H and dated ’04 verso 850 x 650mm

$6000 - $9000

29 Sara Hughes

Love Me Tender No. 1

acrylic on aluminium, 4 pieces title inscribed, signed and dated 2004 on original labels affixed verso installation size: 600 x 1400mm (variable)

$4000 - $6000

30 Guy Ngan

Animated Colours No. 15

acrylic on board signed and dated ’73; title inscribed and dated on original label affixed verso 1215 x 810mm

ART

$15 000 - $20 000

32 33

31 Gordon Walters

Arahura

screenprint, 43/125 title inscribed, signed and dated 1982 760 x 565mm

$7000 - $10 000

32 Julian Dashper

Blue Lagoon

acrylic and watercolour on paper 800 x 600mm

$6000 - $9000

33 Ronnie van Hout

Sincere Thanks

embroidery on cotton title inscribed, signed and dated 1994 verso 400 x 905mm

$4000 - $6000

34 Tony de Lautour

Bad White Art

oil on canvas title inscribed; title inscribed, signed and dated 1994 verso 760 x 1220mm

$10 000 - $15 000

ART

34 35

Richard Killeen 35 The Politics of Geometry

acrylic and collage on aluminium, 29 pieces title inscribed, signed and dated May 10 1991; artist’s original label affixed each piece verso installation size: 1700 x 2660mm variable

$25 000 - $35 000

C

louds go back a long way in Richard Killeen’s art. From the isolated cloud of paintings on glass of 1967 — such as Chimney and Cloud or Ship’s funnel with cloud or Car, hill and cloud — to the wind-blown hillscape of Wind (1971). In 1991 the nine The Politics of Geometry cutouts oppose organic clouds to rationalistic and mechanistic (computer-generated) geometries.

In 1997 there is a cloudburst of the 165 cutout pieces of Rain clouds which contain some lightning too.

The work of Richard Killeen has evolved over the last forty years through a process of copying, adding, layering and reworking images. The more time one spends with this work the more one becomes adept at negotiating the labyrinth of images which has grown and grown in size and complexity. The difficulty is not only that the iconography is taken from extremely varied sources — in the case of The Politics of Geometry (10 May 1991) builder’s sketches, constructivist drawings, Philip Guston, Aztec designs, nature’s cumulus cloud — or that Killeen’s sources are unfamiliar. It is also that Killeen’s sources are personal and familiar, there is no seeming rule that governs the images and the

themes that they are thought to allude. A particular motif or image or object may appear during the same period of work or years apart or even on different formats. This practice reinforces the sense of both the overall unity of Killeen’s art but also its labyrinthine quality. The same image recurs in works that are very different in appearance and theme; the same work refers to several very different images. By following connections of this kind, sometimes stretching across many years, we come upon embedded images or titles just as if we were passing familiar landmarks that have somehow shifted over time. In this way Killeen is continually creating new networks of associations, setting up crossreferences and opening other possible perspectives within a continuously evolving whole. An endless thread is spun from work to work. Each (old) work creates itself anew.

Nephologist Richard Hamblyn in writes: ‘Clouds themselves, by their very nature, are self-ruining and fragmentary. They flee in haste over the visible horizons to their quickly forgotten dénouements. Every cloud is a small catastrophe, a world of vapour that dies before our eyes.’

Killeen, with these exquisitely painted puffy clouds juxtaposed to other hard and soft geometries, is prompted by the affective indeterminancy of the image of clouds. Because it is both formal and formless, the cloud, like his own work, is an open invitation to interpretation.

ART

LAURENCE SIMMONS

36 37

Michael Illingworth 36 Untitled – from the Rangi and Papa Creation Series oil on canvas signed and dated ‘ 71 715 x 612mm

Provenance:

Purchased by the current owner from Peter McLeavey Gallery in 1980 Private collection, Nelson

$65 000 - $85 000

T

he 2001 exhibition A Tourist in Paradise Lost: The Art of Michael Illingworth served to re-introduce the New Zealand public to an enigmatic figure who emerged in the 1960s as one of the most unique and idiosyncratic artists in New Zealand art history.

In these media saturated, anything goes, times it is hard to comprehend the damn good shocking Illingworth’s sexually loaded paintings gave an outraged solid citizenry of New Zealand in the 1960s.

The 72 works assembled for this major retrospective traced the development of Illingworth’s highly personal visual language and his avowed areas of concern.

Illingworth, like his contemporary and friend James K. Baxter cultivated the role of the artist as outsider and social critic. He opposed what he saw as the suffocating tyranny of the suburb and the city with a fierce identification with the land and with romantic and sexual love.

Illingworth’s work of the mid 1960s was trenchantly critical of the restrictions of societal conformity. His creation of the Piss-Quicks, that blank-faced, clueless couple that stare back at the viewer from so many of the mid 60s works was contrasted with overtly sexual Adam and Eve images with enlarged genitals. These works were notorious and the subject of complaints to the police when first exhibited.

Illingworth was very much part of the counter culture movement and in keeping with so many artists and writers of this period Illingworth sought exile and purity in the wilderness, first in Puhoi north of Auckland and later at Coroglen in the Coromandel.

Works such as Untitled, Rangi and Papa Creation Series from 1971 come from this later, more lyrical period. The full frontal attack on the alienating and machine made city is replaced by a lyrical engagement with the natural world and his work is full of fecund and fertile images. Illingworth here directs his gaze to the creation story and the universe of Maori spiritual beliefs. His palette in this work is cosmic and celebratory; the sky is a symphony of jewel like yellows and oranges and the earth a glorious carpet of emerald green.

In this night of creation the male and female tree figures are clearly indicated by conveniently grown phallus and diamond shaped genital symbols. The sentiment is unmistakable and given Illingworth’s earlier coruscating imagery, quite moving.

The suggestion that not only men and women and the birds and bees make love to populate the earth, but also the trees and organic matter of the earth is posited by the artist as an affirmation of the fundamental good of the creation story and Illingworth’s own creative process.

HAMISH CONEY

ART

38 39

Entrance to the City No. 7

oil on canvas on board; title inscribed, signed and dated verso and inscribed BL/ 10 - 1965 signed and dated ‘ 65 920 x 710mm

$16 000 - $24 000

38 Milan Mrkusich

Painting Red

acrylic on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 2001 verso 760 x 610mm

Provenance:

Private collection, South Island

$25 000 - $35 000

ART

37 Robert Ellis

40 41

39 Allen Maddox

We Climbed off the 9 – 42 from Porirua. I Thought I looked a Typical Commuter but… He Recognised Me! (section of a critical essay written by the artist on Coleridge’s Kubla Khan) oil on cotton title inscribed 1050 x 1780mm

Provenance:

From the collector of film-writer, director and author Peter Wells who purchased the work in the early 1980s from Denis Cohn Gallery whilst working as Denis’ assistant.

$22 000 - $30 000

40 Michael Smither

Rocky Landscape

oil on board signed with the artist’s initials and M. D. S and dated ’69 157 x 736mm

ART

$15 000 - $20 000

42 43

41 John Walsh

Manutanga

oil on board title inscribed, signed and dated 2004 1490 x 1190mm

Provenance:

Private Collection, Christchurch

$18 000 - $28 000

42 Don Driver

Painted Relief No. 8

$15 000 - $25 000

ART

acrylic, aluminium and canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 1972 1300 x 1840mm

44 45

43 Ralph Hotere

Drawing For A Black Window

acrylic, watercolour, ink and graphite on paper title inscribed, signed and dated Port Chalmers ’81 555 x 755mm

Provenance:

Private Collection, Wellington

$28 000 - $38 000

44 Frances Hodgkins

The River Tone

watercolour and gouache on paper signed 360 x 480mm

Provenance:

$25 000 - $35 000

ART

Private collection, United Kingdom.

46 47

45 Tony de Lautour

$

oil and acrylic on canvas signed and dated 2002 1010 x 1010mm

$12 000 - $16 000

46 John Reynolds

History is This No. 2

oil stick and acrylic on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 2000 and inscribed From Gertrude Stein’s “Messages from History” 1520 x 1012mm

Provenance:

Private Collection, Auckland

$12 000 - $16 000

47 Robert Ellis

To The City Centre

oil on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 1966 verso 915 x 610mm

Provenance:

Private collection, Wellington

$10 000 - $15 000

48 Garth Tapper

Men in a Pub

oil on board signed and dated ’64; title inscribed and signed verso 627 x 825mm

ART

$14 000 - $20 000

48 49

49 Ian Scott

Lattice No. 12

acrylic on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated May ’77 verso 1525 x 1525mm

$7000 - $10 000

50 Stephen Bambury

Cartesian Circle (X)

rust and acrylic on aluminium, diptych title inscribed, signed and dated 2004 verso 390 x 780mm

Provenance:

Private Collection, Wellington

$10 000 - $15 000

51 Tony Fomison

Untitled

oil on hessian mounted in original electroplated silver breadboard frame 180mm diameter (excluding frame) 240mm diameter (including frame)

Provenance:

Purchased by the current owner from Barry Lett Galleries, circa 1976.

Private Collection, Auckland.

$15 000 - $20 000

52 Tony Fomison

Petrouchka

oil on hessian mounted to board in artist’s original circular frame, title inscribed, signed and dated 1982 and inscribed started 12. 1. 82 at Whangarei; original Janne Land Gallery blind stamp applied verso 225 mm diameter

Provenance:

Private collection, Wellington

ART

$13 000 - $18 000

50 51

53 Jeffrey Harris

Imogen’s Grave

oil on board, triptych title inscribed, signed and dated 1975 1222 x 2918mm overall

Provenance:

Private collection, Dunedin

Exhibited:

Jeffrey Harris, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, October 2nd 2004 – February 13th 2005

Illustrated:

Justin Paton, Jeffrey Harris (Victoria University Press, Wellington), pp. 30 – 31.

$45 000 - $65 000

A

meditation on this great Jeffrey Harris’ painting can be undertaken in two parts. The first, a simple yet instructive description of the work itself and the second an examination of its intensely personal subject matter.

Taking in (or perhaps taking on is a more apt term) the work is a daunting task. Large in scale at 1.2 by 3 metres of pulsating oil on board, Imogen’s Grave can be described as a cauldron. The work posits itself as a modern altarpiece complete with landscape as parable and attending witness or donor figures. In the immediate territory above the two figures are brightly hued, ordered landscapes, images of relative harmony and calm.

Whilst the colour is high key, they are metaphors for a state of attempted inner calm, or alternatively pathways to relief, in the face of the deluge of emotion besetting the protagonists. At the core of this work is a maelstrom of grief.

In the early 1980s Harris explained that his painting was a way to reflect the the drama of life back into the world, ‘until it doesn’t press upon me so much.’1

Harris returned to Dunedin in 1977 to take up the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago. Justin Paton in the catalogue which accompanied the retrospective exhibition, Jeffrey Harris at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2005, described this period as follows, ’In the Hodgkins year Harris lets loose a storm in his work.’2 Paton describes the Imogen works as occupying, ‘a borderland between beauty and grief ’ 3. Imogen’s Grave shows the protagonists, in this case clearly Harris’ and his wife Joanna Paul, beaten even bloodied, but not broken. The artist invites sympathy and empathy, but not pity.

As is the case in so much of Harris’ greatest paintings, amongst which Imogen’s Grave can undoubtedly be counted, the human spirit and the redemptive power of art can provide sufficient succour at even the blackest moment.

Art, Harris is saying, can help you get through, a belief he made explicit in this statement of the early 1980s, ‘What I hope is that someone stands in front of a painting and really gets something out of it. Feels the power. Whether it’s life or death, that’s not important.’4

Hamish Coney 1

Justin Paton, Jeffrey Harris, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Victoria University Press, 2005, p.17 2 ibid 3 ibid 4

Jim and Mary Barr, Contemporary New Zealand Painters, 1980, p.102

ART

What was pressing on Harris in 1977 was the death of his daughter Imogen in December of 1976. Harris and his wife Joanna Paul both confronted their grief head on, Harris in this cycle of paintings and Paul in her book of poetry simply titled Imogen.

52 53

Shane Cotton 54 Powder Garden

acrylic on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 2002 and inscribed Kite Karu 705 x 1063mm

Provenance:

Private Collection, Auckland

$45 000 - $65 000

P

owder Garden marks a significant transition from Shane Cotton’s sepia-toned ‘history paintings’ that came to prominence in the early 1990s. Examining New Zealand’s biculturalism through the faux patina of age, Cotton’s paintings were often personal investigations into aspects of culture, ownership and other historical issues.

The narrative potential of these earlier works is obfuscated in Powder Garden, in which a selection of embryonic symbols hover upon a seductively smoky, air-brushed background. Cotton’s once stratified landscapes reminiscent of the typographical sketches of Charles Heaphy, among others, are now confined to the very bottom of the canvas, subdued by an indeterminate dreamscape.

Cotton paints intuitively, often working from rough drawings or photocopies from secondary sources. Powder Garden displays a fragmentary series of objects drawn from the artist’s rich pictorial lexicon. He incorporates signature motifs includi ng ghoulish upoko tuhituhi (tattooed heads), floating text panels in English and Te Reo, a bird (established in his earlier paintings as the ancestral bird Taiamai from his birthplace in the far North and significant in Maori folklore as messenger from the spirit world) and the concentric circle. The interrelationship between these objects is not immediately apparent. Rather, their inclusion encourages free association between symbols. This form of non-linear narrative is analogous to the fluidity of Maori oral traditions in which notions of past, present and future exist simultaneously – stories are relayed across time, rather than categorized by it.

Cotton’s oeuvre embodies a constantly evolving vocabulary of signs. Conveying a series of hybrid symbols that include Maori artifacts alongside contemporary icons, Jim and Mary Barr observed that Cotton’s post-2000 paintings are more about thinking than speaking; they ‘…record the process of developing ideas rather than the presentation of ideas already well formed.’ 1 By offering multiple perspectives of mutable significance, Cotton’s paintings are not easily defined; their appeal lies in their beguiling ambiguity.

SERENA BENTLEY 1

Barr, Jim and Mary, ‘An Argument for Imagery,’ in Shane Cotton, City Gallery Wellington, 2003, p109

ART

54 55

Bill Hammond 55 Bank Video

acrylic on vinyl wallpaper, four panels title inscribed, signed and dated 1989 each panel: 535 x 1935mm variable installation size: 2500 x 2400mm

“The whole histor y of the world must be reduced to wallpaper in front of which characters must pose…”

W. B. YEATS

T

here’s another Hammond-land which I felt oddly nostalgic for when I had the pleasure of wandering through the almost too-superbly presented Jingle Jangle Morning, recently in Christchurch. It’s a world where the line between pleasure and pain (aesthetic, cultural, physical, sociological…) is far more tenuous and in which the space we inhabit feels far more confined and uneasy than that encountered in the dark, capacious halls of the beautifully spotlit ground floor of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu.

Critics have tended to divide Hammond’s career neatly into two phases: those works painted before the artist’s watershed trip to Auckland Islands and those painted after. Apart from a few transitional works in the early 1990s, it is easy to see why. Many of Hammond’s supporters also seem to divide themselves neatly along these lines; there are those which are intoxicated by the eloquence of works as achingly beautiful as The Fall of Icarus (1995) and those which prefer the less celebrated, grittier works such as this one. Increasingly, I’ve found myself in the latter camp.

Painted in 1990, Bank Video is one of a number of works conceived on wallpaper.

Consistent with all of the artist’s manoeuvres, one imagines his choice of media to be a carefully considered one. A drop of wallpaper is perfectly suited to Hammond’s vernacular of this time, inspired as it is by comic books, narrativity, violent perspectives, claustrophobia, cinema and rock music. Moreover, the incessant repetition of wallpaper patterns lends itself perfectly to the artist’s obsessive aesthetic. This time rather than overt patternation the wallpaper exhibits soft textural, vertical striations – like some kind of toxic rain it continues unabated throughout the four panels of Bank Video, symptomatic for sure, of what Justin Paton refers to as, ‘apocalyptic wallpaper’.

Bank Video, like many works from this period is both funny and frightening. Whilst the medium may act as an overt metaphor for the reduction of art to mere passive décor, the composition hints at a world of tension, paranoia and psychic pressure in which certain figures may crack. As everyday consumers hit the deck to a backdrop of raining percentages, dollar signs and hulking figures wielding momentous shot guns we get the feeling that the artist, like his motley crew of protagonists caught on film in Bank Video, might have some questions about the direction in which our collective contemporary society is heading.

BEN PLUMBLY

Provenance:

Private Collection, Auckland

$75 000 - $95 000

ART

56 57

Colin McCahon 56 Bather

gouache on paper, circa 1952 artist’s name inscribed verso 250 x 195mm

Provenance:

From the collection of Colin McCahon’s god daughter.

Passed by descent to her from her father Mr Graham Ecroyd, close friend and colleague of the artist during their time at Auckland University.

$30 000 - $40 000

F

or the last ten years of his life Cézanne laboured over a monumental painting entitled The Large Bathers (1895-1906) that now hangs in the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania. A composition of nine naked or near naked figures in a clearing by a stream, some apparently toweling themselves, others just basking in the sun. There can be few images which have such a mythical and monumental status as Cézanne’s late Bathers, and few artists that occupy such an important position as the founder of subsequent pictorial traditions. In the words of Clement Greenberg, ‘Cézanne is the most copious source of what we know as modern art, the most abundant generator of ideas and the most enduring in newness.’ So it is not surprising that McCahon, painting in Christchurch in the early 1950s, was drawn to Cézanne’s bathers available to him in reproduction from a Phaidon monograph on the artist first published in 1947. In fact McCahon’s subject in Bather (c. 1952) is derived from one of the flanking figures in Cézanne’s The Large Bathers who in a similar fashion with one hand draws her train of toweling up to the centre of her body between her breasts.

There is a quality of revelation to McCahon’s figure. She stands as if on display, her head placed on one side, her right arm hanging limp by her side; a certain massiveness to the set of her shoulders and the fall of her breasts. McCahon has made no attempt to capture her character; her face is almost featureless. There exists a feeling of time here having stopped. The tone of the painting is set by supercharged greens and blues. Different shades of green pattern the tree foliage and the vegetation on the background hills. But somehow the colours are made continuous throughout: the blue of the sky edges the bather’s body, a tree trunk and even strays over the surface of clumps of greenery; background cloud and foreground flesh repeat each other; the dark red-brown of the hair appears on a tree trunk and in a background triangle. In a dynamic encounter with landscape the figure is fitted to or contained by the framework of the trees that surround and encase it. We are left with a field of sensation, which obliterates, obscures and smudges bodily presence, collapsing figure and ground and subsuming the body into a proliferation of paint, which creates an equivalence between flesh and foliage.

Cézanne’s bodies with their coarseness and ambiguity have long unsettled, provoked and disturbed viewers. For artists, Cézanne’s Bathers have functioned as a source, an origin, a prize to be struggled over. It is in the interaction of figure and ground, the blurring of body and surface that the very modernity of his images can be found.

This is the prize that McCahon wins from Cézanne: a new mode of looking, one which stems from a bodily encounter with the world of physical sensations, a visceral witnessing of the world.

LAURENCE SIMMONS

ART

58 59

John Pule 57 Taulani

oil on unstretched canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 2003 2020 x 1815mm

Provenance:

Private Collection, Auckland

$30 000 - $40 000

R

eading between the lines; John Pule’s Taulani. As well as being a visual artist Pule is also the author of the novel titled Burn my Head in Heaven. The conflicts and joys of navigating multiple belief systems; religious, cultural and personal, is at the heart of Pule’s multi-disciplined practice.

Given his proficiency in a number of genres it is instructive to enter this canvas via an inscription to be found in the minutiae of the banded colour and pictograms that animate the painting’s surface.

As a viewer it may not be one’s instinctive reaction to move closer, indeed the scale of the work demands a distant view to comprehend its grand design.

But there amongst the black and blood red striations that set the tone for the work is a tender tableau that suggests a possible reading for this work. Two lovers converse in lyric tongue, ‘It’s nights like this when I can watch you sleep – my eyes are two wings in the belly of a butterfly – only because I know where your tears go at dawn.’ The other figure offering a flower responds, ‘ Your face contains matters of pure aesthetics.’

These secret whisperings and other symbols and statements are hidden between the lines of the work. Peer ever more closely and you will see a church with steeples, a dolphin-like sea creature, even a St. John’s ambulance. Depicted at least four times and on various scales is a classic Pule motif, clouds and islands linked by ladders and stairs.

On the cloud side is a welcoming or beckoning figure. It is a simple device to reveal Pule’s connection between the landbased temporal existence of the human world and the heavenly or spiritual realm.

The mingling of these vignettes of lovers and spiritual migration within Pule’s overall formal schema is derived from the design traditions of Nuiean hiapo or tapa than creates a universe of symbols and non linear narratives.

Pule has created a distinct library of imagery that personalizes his Polynesian and New Zealand experience. The weaving of personal, cultural symbolism and language enables his work to be readily understood or read on a number of levels. For example the vines of the ti mata alea (cordyline tree) that trail beneath the cloud forms are a direct reference to the Niuean belief that all life is originated from this tree.

Here they may be read as a metaphor for the immigrant growing in a new land, yet retaining key cultural DNA from his homeland.

HAMISH CONEY

ART

60 61

58 Don Binney

Poline Kotare IV

lithographic drawing with applied oil and oil stick signed and dated 2002 555 x 555mm

$8000 - $12 000

59 Jacqueline Fahey

Can Painting Change Anything?

acrylic on canvas signed and dated 2003; original Anna Miles Gallery label affixed verso 690 x 1200mm

$6000 - $9000

60 Robert Rauschenberg

Justice and Liberty for All off-set lithograph and silkscreen, 66/125 signed and dated ‘76; original certificate of authenticity affixed verso 760 x 572mm

$1200 - $2000

61 Richard McWhannell

Portrait of Jane Callaghan No. 2

oil on linen title inscribed, signed and dated 2004 verso 370 x 445mm

$5000 - $8000 62 Pat Hanly

The Poor Kids Picnic

oil on board with applied gold foil signed and dated ’91; title inscribed and signed verso 520 x 560mm

$10 000 $15 000 63 Jeffrey Harris

Untitled: Australian Landscape

graphite on paper artist’s name, title and date (1990)inscribed on original Tony Oliver label affixed verso 128 x 188mm

ART

$800 - $1400

62 63

64 Richard Killeen

Born Alive in New Zealand

ink and watercolour on paper title inscribed, signed and dated 9 – 9 – 85 760 x 580mm

$4500 - $6500

65 Ralph Hotere

Winter Solstice

lithograph with applied graphite and gold leaf signed and dated ‘96 770 x 575mm

$10 000 - $15 000

66 Luise Fong

Small Orbit No. 8

acrylic and Chinese ink on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 1995 verso 452 x 610mm

$3500 - $5500

67 Euan McLeod

Trees and Bush, Springfield

acrylic on paper artist’s name, title and date (1989) printed on original label affixed verso 630 x 795mm

$3000 - $5000

68 Toss Woollaston

Mount Arthur

watercolour signed and dated ’71 302 x 440mm

$4000 - $6000

69 Peter James Smith

The Speed of Light

mixed media on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 1997 verso 720 x 1912mm

ART

$6000 - $9000

64 65

70 Bill Hammond

Untitled

acrylic and ink on paper signed and dated 1993 765 x 570mm

$8000 - $14 000

71 Tony de Lautour

Body Corp No. 6 oil on canvas title inscribed, signed with artist’s initials T. D. L and dated 2000 1505 x 1008mm

$9000 - $13 000

72 Doris Lusk

The Tree House

watercolour, pastel and graphite on paper signed and dated 1976 632 x 549mm

$5000 - $8000

73 Peter Siddell

Passage

acrylic on board signed and dated 1977; title inscribed and signed verso 360 x 260mm

$7000 - $10 000

74 Don Binney

Kotare over the Coast

charcoal on paper signed and dated 1965 302 x 380mm

ART

$8000 - $12 000

66 67

75 Tony Fomison

Night and Day

oil on canvasboard title inscribed, signed and dated June 1988 – 1989 and inscribed Lincoln St/Wanganui Ave Grey Lynn verso 370 x 745mm Provenamce: Private Collection, South Island

$35 000 - $45 000

76 Peter McIntyre

Maori Boys, Rotorua oil on canvas signed 750 x 595mm

$20 000 - $30 000

ART

68 69

Bill Hammond 77 Boulder Bay 4

acrylic on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 2001 400 x 600mm

Provenance:

Private Collection, Wellington

$65 000 - $85 000

B

oulder Bay, facing out to sea from Banks Peninsula, is a place for primary school field trips.

A place where children yelling to each other clamber over boulders to explore rock pools filled with tender sea anemones, barnacles and starfish. It is all blue sea and blue sky accompanied by the din of waves on rocks and the screeching of seagulls overhead.

Hammond’s Boulder Bay evokes a different geography. Hammond’s bay inhabitants don’t yell, nor do they peer down into rock pools, timidly poking and nudging underwater life. Hammond’s figures wait and watch. Their screeching, speaking, calling, sighing and growling takes place inaudibly to human ears.

This rocky shore is a spectral space, both waiting room and jumping off point.

Hammond creates a sliding zone between being human and being avian. Things could be slipping either way, like the ebb and flow of a tide on the turn. A pale white bird silhouette balances upside down on the head of the seated bird-human like a holy flame, a puff of smoke, a premonition. A pink figure shares a tear with the large grey bird above, while holding a leader’s baton or a rolled message in arms that becomes clawed legs. These two figures hold the key. They are the ones who will call others to this place. The waiting is inexorable. Everything is so still, calm; and the forms are so slippery, it is like watching a sleeping figure to see if they are still breathing.

Legions of Bill’s birds have waited on shorelines before. The birds waiting for Buller always seemed ready to tear the explorer apart, beak and claw, if he ever returned. Here it is not Buller, but dark, slug-like creatures, a horse’s head with craning neck, angel and bat-winged figures which set their flight path, drifting away from, or perhaps towards the shore. If they are humans becoming bird, what will they experience here once their transformation is complete? If we know, we do not have words to tell it yet.

ROB GARRETT

ART

70 71

Michael Smither 78 Among the Cabbages oil on board signed and dated ‘67 905 x 1030mm

Provenance:

Private Collection, Auckland

$75 000 - $100 000

P

ainted in 1967, this picture dates from Michael Smither’s period living at The Gables in New Plymouth, set in Pukekura Park. It was an enormously productive and inspiring time for the painter, who found great inspiration in watching his young children. A major exhibition devoted to Smither’s works from this period, The Wonder Years, toured New Zealand last year.

The painter’s daughter, Sarah, shown here, was born November 16, 1964, and his son, Thomas, was born May 11, 1967. Smither brilliantly captures Sarah’s magical encounter in the cabbage plants, bewitched by a cabbage elf holding a worm for her specimen jar. It is a painting that embraces the ripe imagination of childhood, the richness of childhood experiences.

Indeed, the poetry and fantasy of the natural world are palpable in Michael Smither’s paintings as a whole. He materialises the pulp of everyday life, whether the bony protrusions of rocks, the froth silks of clouds, or, as we see in this painting, the waxy thick texture of cabbages. The rhythm of the cabbage veins and flopping and poking leaves erupt across the surface of the canvas and pay homage to nature’s movement.

The formal qualities of the painting, then, the undulations of line, and the big crunches of colour, mostly green, are striking.

The poetry of the everyday in Smither’s paintings extends to the relationship between people and nature, the interface between experiences and objects. He bites into a painted reality that bridges the quotidian and fantastic in a brilliantly evocative way.

Erin Griffey

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72 73

Peter Robinson 79 High Interest Low Interest

oil and bitumen on plywood, diptych signed and dated ’95 verso 707 x 1110mm overall

Provenance:

Purchased by the current owner from Brooke Gifford Gallery, Christchurch in April 1995.

Private Collection, Wellington

$20 000 - $30 000

O

riginally trained as a sculptor, Peter Robinson’s early works dealt with personal and racial issues as he simultaneously analysed his heritage and position as an artist. Reminiscent of street vendor signs, the rough, hand-scrawled slogans ‘low interest,’ ‘high interest’ convey Robinson’s critical exploration of art as commodity and the concept of artistic careerism. Brash in execution, the artist’s work comments on the commercial exchange and cultural politics of the art world. His paintings from the 1990s often refer to sale prices and discounts, executed in a signature palette of red, white and black.

Robinson uses these traditional Maori colours to investigate aspects of eminent contemporary politics. He examines biculturalism with a direct, sometimes aggressive visual language. Exploring his own mixed ethnicity in a series known as the Percentage Paintings in the early 1990s, Robinson (of Ngai Tahu descent) used his own 3.25% of ‘Maoriness’ to expose the problems of measuring ethnicity through blood quantities, questioning how Maori blood determined his personal and artistic character. Pigeonholed by art critics and curators as a ‘Maori artist,’ Robinson was unwilling to utilise traditional Maori art forms because he felt ‘inauthentic.’ 1 Social and political commentary typifies Robinson’s oeuvre. While the economic terminology of Low Interest, High Interest, could arguably refer to the unfair trade of land in colonial New Zealand, the oblique messages equally recount the practical terms of trade and exchange. Rendered upon a spare, black and white canvas, Robinson’s direct, graphic style expresses a wry and wary take on the art trade.

Serena Bentley

1 Sue Crockford Gallery website, http://www.suecrockford.com/artists/biography.asp?aid=48

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74 75

80 Dick Frizzell

Egyptian Style Tiki

oil on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 11/8/98 785 x 645mm

$24 000 - $34 000

81 John Reynolds

Emblem (Stake)

oil and oil stick on canvas and plywood with linocut block signed and dated 1987; title inscribed, signed and dated verso 1800 x 2000mm

ART

$12 000 - $18 000

76 77

Ralph Hotere 82 Drawing for Cyanidefects: Aluminpolitik watercolour, acrylic and ink on paper signed and dated Port Chalmers ’80 750 x 550mm

Provenance:

Private Collection, Wellington

$30 000 - $40 000

N

ot only one of New Zealand’s greatest artists, Ralph Hotere has, through the medium of his art, become known as a passionate advocate of a variety of causes. Most famous is his opposition to the 1980’s proposal to build an aluminium smelter on top of the salt marsh at Aramoana, near his home. Drawing for Cyanidefects:Aluminpolitik was produced in 1980 as part of the series of works he completed in protest at the proposal.

The immediate beauty of the painting is obvious. However a closer look reveals a number of significant elements. The luminous white cloud, which dominates the top of the painting gives the illusion of landscape, but also compares the impact of the proposed smelter to the devastation of an atomic bomb, hence the atomic plume, so dramatic were Hotere’s feelings of anguish and opposition toward it. The pollution of air and water, the effect on the harbour and wildlife within the area were seen as catastrophic.

Through the medium of his art Hotere creates a metaphor for the process of the aluminium smelter. Beginning with raw materials, whether they be canvas or metal, the elements combine to produce alchemic effects and in both cases, the result can be explosive.

The composition of the painting brings to mind Colin McCahon’s Necessary Protection paintings. The ‘T’ formation creating an illusion of sky, with a fall of light into a nighttime landscape. Experimentation with the colour black has been a key element in Hotere’s work and is further explored in the present painting.

Well known for his art/text collaborations with poet Bill Manhire, Hotere takes the opportunity in this work to play on words, just as he plays with imagery to hit home his position on the Aramoana smelter. We are unable to ignore the repetitive text, glimmering and fading throughout the centre of the work: CYANIDeFecTs, reading both as – Cyanide effects and Cyanide defects. In Hotere’s mind, was there really any choice?

LEIGH MELVILLE

ART

78 79

Tony Fomison 83 In Solitary

oil on jute on board title inscribed signed and dated 3.2.73 – 13.4.73 verso 550 x 390mm

$60 000 - $80 000

T

his painting is part of a suite of works that Tony Fomison produced in the early seventies that showed an increasing interest in the state of the human psyche when it suffers from an immense sense of isolation and despair. It was a characteristic of these works to find the human form broken down in to a set of inconsolable parts; hands that reach out into the darkness only to be greeted by emptiness and faces that look beyond their situation for solace only to find an unending abyss or simply themselves reflected back.

What is also striking about the painting that starts emerging from Fomison’s studio in this period is the unerring sense of focus not only in terms of subject-matter but also technical prowess. With his move from Christchurch to Auckland in 1973, in particular a multi-cultural Ponsonby, Fomison settled into an artistic groove that saw him developing a whole new mythology of material and a professional approach to his practice. With a more structured and less itinerant lifestyle his paintings also became more consistent in their methodology, it was not unusual to find him working on numerous paintings at the same time as he refined his pictorial elements down to a final composition.

In Solitary produced during this vital epoch retains a number of the key elements that are characteristic of his most celebrated works in its ashen, labyrinthine and shadowy qualities. But while this work sustains Fomison’s interest in transgressive, gothic and even secretive activities it also introduces another emotional trait, hope. Maybe this is the byproduct of Fomison’s relocation to a more culturally diverse and for him more accepting social situation, but it also might simply reflect a growing self-belief in his own place as an artist. As he noted at this time: ‘I am very committed to painting and therefore very prejudiced. I believe that vision is everything, but that despite the large population today, it is probably as rare as ever.

And I don’t mean optical vision, I mean the narrated, imagined vision of the visionary.’1

Aaron Kreisler .Eight Young Artists, N.Z. Academy, August 1973.

1

ART

80 81

Ian Scott 84 Don Binney at Te Henga

oil on board signed and dated 1969; title inscribed on artist’s original label affixed verso 1440 x 2200mm

“Hey turn around Don, and I’ll paint you and Ihumoana Island...”

I

’d like to sit this painting alongside one by Binney from three years earlier.

You may know the one I mean as it hangs just down the road in Auckland Art Gallery. It’s the one Binney painted of Te Henga (Bethells Beach) from almost the same vantage point as Scott’s portrait, with the most stylised of all his birds, a fern bird, painted in abstract bold stripes. Actually, I’d like to superimpose the two paintings for you because the right-hand third of Scott’s almost exactly corresponds to the left-hand third of Binney’s in outline and aspect. Together they make a west coast panorama. It is as if Scott has come up behind Binney while the latter was painting his fern bird overlooking Te Henga and said “Hey turn around Don, and I’ll paint you and Ihumoana Island just like that.”

Veneration and masterwork are the two words that are most apt for this painting. It is a masterwork by the 24 year old, not because it is the pinnacle of his landscapes of 1966 - 67 or the girlies of 1968 - 70; but because it sits above them like a halo. It occupies an emblematic space that contains and yet exceeds the achievements of both series. It exceeds them through its youthful veneration. Scott’s portrait of Binney is the ‘sacred’ counterpoint to the ‘profanity’ of the sexually charged girlie series; and it is the heroic counterpoint to the realism of his earlier landscapes because it is carries the weight of Binney’s philosophies.

Though Scott and Binney were contemporaries, the slightly younger artist paints his ornithologist friend with reverence and a kind of tender camaraderie as practitioners of Hamish Keith’s ‘hard light’ school. Scott achieves both the grandeur (it is a large painting by local standards) and the humanity of centuries of allegorical portraits with a deft touch. Veneration shows in the scale; the almost saintly gentleness of Binney’s expression; the locale with its then endangered wetlands and bush so close to Binney’s heart; and in the painting style, which Scott seems to have borrowed momentarily from the other artist.

Rob Garrett

$40 000 - $60 000

ART

82 83

Don Binney 85 King George with Bird in Landscape

oil on paper signed and dated 1983; original Fletcher Challenge label affixed verso 1070 x 705mm

Provenance:

Fletcher Challenge collection.

Private collection, South Island

$40 000 - $60 000

T

he role birds play in New Zealand art is cause for much celebration and on occasion a degree of puzzlement. Celebration that Aotearoa’s menagerie of winged fauna has so captivated artists and their audiences since the time mankind first stepped ashore in Godzone and puzzlement that New Zealand’s birds are required to carry so much meaning in our visual arts culture - a big job for a little bird!

The roll call of artists who have asked a fantail, a tui or a woodpigeon to fulfill the role of cultural avatar is long and glorious. Our feathered friends’ artistic presence is insistent and consistent most recently being celebrated in the wonderful exhibition Birds at Pataka Gallery in 2005.

Glorious native birds were the subject of Don Binney’s work when it emerged fully formed in the early 1960s. Binney was lauded as a rare talent, an artist whose engagement with the unique forms of the New Zealand landscape and its native species made him both hugely popular and hailed as a distinctive local talent. Rather unwillingly the artist became enrolled as a poster boy-wonder in the nationalist debate.

Today, Binney is accorded the status of not only a great New Zealand artist but also in these environmentally challenged times he is acknowledged as a prescient and inspirational conservationist. In between times however the picture was not so rosy. The artist returned to New Zealand in the 1970s from an extended period overseas to find a local artworld intent on engaging with international trends and critical thinking. It was a period when Binney was marginalized and re (or de)positioned as a parochial realist.

This comment from 1980 indicates the depth of feeling that this treatment engendered in the artist and goes to the heart of his artistic concerns, ‘The one thing that bought me back to New Zealand was that coast. At least it has not betrayed me. My involvement with it is as deep as ever.’ 1 The coast in question was the west coast of Auckland. In what can be called Binney’s interregnum period he returned to the landscape with a perspicacious eye. Piha and Te Henga evolved into a location for not just a deep spiritual connection with the life of the land, but also a meditation on New Zealand’s growing awareness of its colonial history.

In a work such as King George with Bird in Landscape of 1983 the artist addresses the intervention of man into our avian Eden. The birds must share air and mindspace with the Crown as colonizer, land owner and arbiter of value. Binney makes a direct connection between the Crown as head of state and as a money manager as the images are lifted directly from coins.

Binney’s work from this period is tougher than much of the work created before and after. It comes from a time of turmoil for the artist and for the country. The artist is asking the viewer not just to connect with a place, but also the ideas and values that may protect, threaten or transform that place.

What makes King George with Bird in Landscape so pungent today is that these issues are very much alive.

Hamish Coney 1

Barr, Jim and Mary, ‘Contemporary New Zealand Painters,’ 1980, p30

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84 85

86 Jeffrey Harris

Stranger in a Strange Land

oil on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 1982 verso 660 x 660mm

Provenance:

Private collection, Dunedin

Exhibited:

Jeffrey Harris, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, October 2nd 2004 – February 13th 2005

Illustrated:

Justin Paton, Jeffrey Harris (Victoria University Press, Wellington), p. 27.

$20 000 - $30 000

87 Mervyn Williams

Fusion

acrylic on canvas, diptych title inscribed, signed and dated 1996 verso 1530 x 1680mm

Provenance:

$15 000 - $20 000

ART

Private Collection, Waiheke Island

86 87

88 Jenny Dolezel

Atlas of Emotion

oil on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 2005 1900 x 1590mm

$19 000 - $26 000

89 Emily Karaka

Niho o Te Taniwha (Teeth of the Taniwha) oil on canvas, diptych title inscribed verso 1820 x 2420mm overall

Exhibited:

$6000 - $9000

ART

Emily Karaka: Claims Wai 423 and 357, te tuhi – the mark, 3 May – 3 June 2001

88 89

90 Shane Cotton

Welcome, Pararaiha, Moerewa, Kikorangi, Veil, A Walk in Paradise

A suite of six lithographs printed at the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne, editon 6/40 lithographs, 6/40 titles inscribed, signed and dated 2004 on each 560 x 760mm

$14 000 - $20 000

ART

90 91

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94 95

Index of Artists ARTIST

Lot number

Billy Apple Stephen Bambury Don Binney Emma Camden Philip Clairmont Bronwynne Cornish Shane Cotton Julian Dashper Neil Dawson Jenny Dolezel Don Driver Tony de Lautour Paul Dibble Cade Englefield Robert Ellis Jacqueline Fahey Charlotte Fisher Tony Fomison Luise Fong Jacqueline Fraser Dick Frizzell Bill Hammond Pat Hanly Jeffrey Harris Frances Hodgkins Ralph Hotere Sara Hughes Gavin Hurley Michael Illingworth Peter James-Smith Donald Judd

11 50 58, 74, 85 20 13 25 54, 90 32 12 88 42 34, 45, 71 1, 2 26 37, 47 59 22, 23 51, 52, 75, 83 66 24 80 55, 70, 77 62 53, 63, 86 44 43 29 28 36 69 4

ARTIST Emily Karaka Virginia King Richard Killeen Doris Lusk Allen Maddox Veronika Maser Colin McCahon Peter McIntyre Euan McLeod Richard McWhannell Milan Mrkusich Guy Ngan Michael Parekowhai John Pule Robert Rauschenberg John Reynolds Ann Robinson Peter Robinson Peter Roche Ian Scott Peter Siddell Michael Smither Terry Stringer Llew Summers Garth Tapper Michael Tuffery Ronnie van Hout John Walsh Gordon Walters Mervyn Williams Toss Woollaston

Lot number 89 6 35, 64 72 39 16 56 76 67 61 38 30 18, 21 57 60 46, 81 3, 10, 19 27, 79 5 49, 84 73 40 15, 17 14 48 7, 8, 9 33 41 31 87 68

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